Comment 6 for bug 587306

Item #4 may or may not be worth doing. In the case of the X.org bugzilla at freedesktop.org I've found it is not worthwhile to search for duplicate bugs. Too often (at least with hardware bugs), one person's symptom looks much like anothers, and it's quite hard to definitively prove it as a dupe.

Rather, I just forward the bug upstream and focus on trying to make it as clear and complete as possible, and let upstream decide whether or not its a dupe. In bugzilla, like in launchpad, duping is fairly easy.

For other projects, like GNOME or OpenOffice.org, it's possible that searching for dupes upstream may be worthwhile.

In any case, I mentored a Google Summer of Code student who wrote a prototype upstream-bug-searching tool, that could give a jump-off-point for anyone wanting to work on solving this item:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~arsenal-devel/arsenal/master/annotate/head%3A/scripts/match-upstream.py